Andy Mitchell and Facebook’s weird state of denial about news

Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s director of news and global media partnerships, arrived at the (superb) international journalism festival in Perugia last week to speak about news on Facebook. Thirty per cent of American adults get their news via Facebook (27% in the UK); 88% of millennials in the US do so (71% in Italy). Each month, 1.4bn people use Facebook. That makes Mitchell one of the most – if not the most – powerful news distributors on the planet.

And what Mitchell had to say was straightforward in most ways (full video here) and extremely odd in one important omission.

Facebook wants to improve the “experience” (this word cropped up a lot) of people getting their news on mobile to improve. Links to clunky news sites load slowly and Facebook is talking to major sites (such as the New York Times and Buzzfeed) about embedding their journalism directly in Facebook. Every statistic underlines how much people like getting their news on Facebook.

This was all fascinating, but there wasn’t any mention of how Facebook sees and handles its role as a news gatekeeper, influencing both the detail and flow of what people see. The issue didn’t come up right till the end when a Scandinavian questioner asked Mitchell about instances of Facebook cutting out material from the news linked from his organisation and an Italian student followed up. Mitchell batted both questions away without addressing either directly.

I then asked Mitchell (it’s at 54.36 here) whether he thought Facebook was in anyway accountable to its community for the integrity of its news feed. Mitchell, by now looking pretty pissed off, repeated that Facebook wanted people to have a “great experience”, that the feed gives them “what they’re interested in” and that Facebook’s feed should be “complementary” to other news sources. In short, he didn’t begin to answer the question.

For the senior news guy with such gatekeeper and distribution power to evade these questions is condescending and dishonest. Facebook is not, and knows quite well it is not, a neutral machine passing on news. Its algorithm chooses what people see, it has “community standards” that material must meet and it has to operate within the laws of many countries.

The claim that Facebook doesn’t think about journalism has to be false. And, at least in the long run, it won’t work; in the end these issues have to faced. Facebook is a private sector company which has grown and made billions by very successfully keeping more people on its site for longer and longer. I can imagine that any suggestion that there are responsibilities which distract from that mission must seem like a nuisance.

Google once claimed something similar. Its executives would sit in newspaper offices and claim, with perfectly straight faces, that Google was not a media company. As this stance gradually looked more and more absurd, Google grew up and began to discuss its own power in the media.

It was difficult to pass a day in Perugia without being reminded of how Facebook is making (usually via its algorithms) news decisions every hour. Someone reminded me of the survey in the US which showed large percentages of respondents quite unaware that Facebook has an adjustable formula which determines what their newsfeed shows. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen mentioned in a presentation the disagreements which temporarily took news from the Danish media company Berlinske off Facebook (at issue was a picture of some hippies in the 1960s frolicking nude in the sea). There was another row in Denmark when Facebook objected to a picture of Michelangelo’s (also nude) statue of David. An editor for the Turkish daily Milliyet reminded me that Facebook has strict rules about how Kurdish flags are seen on its feed in Turkey.

I’m hardly the first person to be struck by the weird attitude Facebook strikes. I re-read an excellent post by Jay Rosen on this theme. And there are wider discussions of the responsibilities of the search and social giants by Martin Moore and Emily Bell.

All of this convinced me that Facebook’s state of denial will have to end, sooner or later.

Update 21/4/15: La Repubblica asked Andy Mitchell pretty much the same question (penultimate one in this Q&A in English) and got the same kind of opaque answer.

22/4/15: Jay Rosen (see just above) added some more commentary (“Facebook please stop with this”), making the good point that people are curious about Facebook’s news handling precisely because it is not editing of the kind which shaped pre-digital media.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2015 at 10:27 am and is filed under Media Economics, Social Media, Standards.
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3 comments

Though having recently spent at least half a day assisting a friend send google take down requests for copyright infringement and highly libellous content (which they refused to take action on) I find the notion that the organisation is “grown up” in news terms somewhat optimistic.